The argument over Death in Venice is always about whether the theme is homosexual desire. Which is too bad really. When I first read Thomas Mann's short novel as a young..... more

Thomas Mann

COMMENTARY

The politics of an apolitical writer

Thomas Mann is one of the great writers of the first half of the twentieth century, about whom it is difficult to say whether he was a herald of a new modern literary age or one of the last of a dying age.

Perhaps this is why reading him can make one
feel both hopeful and slightly disappointed. His work comes across as
obviously Great Literature, but somehow just never as earth-shaking as hoped.

His first great work and still his most highly regarded, Buddenbrooks(1901), has been called a very old-fashioned novel—following the
fortunes of a prominent family over several generations, like many a
great English, French or Russian novel of the 1800s. It is an exhaustively
realistic novel in the tradition of Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy.

At the same time Buddenbrooks has been admired for its clear-eyed,
quietly ironic detachment from its subjects, and has been cited as a
model for many a great family history to come in the 1900s. John Galsworthy's
Forsyte Saga comes to mind, along with countless trashier
novels of multi-generational conflict right up into the current era.
No wonder Buddenbrooks has repeatedly been adapted for films.

Politically also, Mann has had a few turning points. Born to a wealthy
family in L—beck, Germany, where his father served two terms as the
equivalent of mayor, young Thomas was conservative and patriotic. Right
into the First World War the author supported the German establishment
with Kaiser Wilhelm at the head. His writing of this period, mainly
short stories and essays, tended to extol public duty and self-sacrifice
for the greater cause—namely, respectability and social stability.

This led to a split with his elder brother, Heinrich Mann, who was
equally famous in the early years of the century as a German writer
with radical left-wing leanings. (Among Heinrich's works is the acclaimed
Professor Unrat in 1905, filmed by Josef von Sternberg
as The Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich in 1930.) Thomas argued
the artist could reach spiritual fulfillment only by keeping independent
of politics and focusing on the nourishment of his own ego. He reacted
to Heinrich's attack on authoritarianism with a spirited defence of
the establishment and claims for German superiority that bordered on
racism—views he would later recant.

The publication of Mann's diaries after his death have led to the
suggestion that his excessive conservatism in his early adult life was
a cover for homosexual desires. Desperately wanting to fit into the
establishment, he is supposed to have suppressed any indication of aberrant behaviour,
according to this analysis.

Around this time Thomas Mann wrote the work that may be best known
to the general public, Death in Venice (1912), concerning a middle-aged
scholarly writer who falls in love—from a distance—with an adolescent boy.
In the novella, the intellectual's psychological surrender to desire
leads to his destruction. This work too has been filmed several times
for cinema and television.

However, by the end of the First World War, Mann's thoughts were
shifting from his high-purposed intellectual notions toward more down-to-earth
progressive and political ideas. In the post-War period he became a
spokesman for democracy and humanism in the new Germany. His novel
The Magic Mountain (1924) portrays a fight with the forces of
enlightenment and rationality on one side and reaction and irrationality
on the other, presaging the clash with fascism that was soon to engulf Europe.

His next major work, the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers
(1933-43), retells the Bible story as a conflict between freedom and
tyranny. By this time, Mann had rejoined his brother philosophically
as a proponent of socialism. He has been claimed by the left as a great
author ever since—although his subject matter remained high-brow
and he was never a writer of proletarian issues.

When Hitler came to power, Mann with and his wife and children
were forced to leave Germany. They lived first in Switzerland and then,
for about fourteen years, in the United States. However, the American
persecution of leftists after the Second World War disillusioned Mann
and in 1952 he returned to Europe, to live mainly in Switzerland until
his death.

Among his latter works is Doctor Faustus (1947), a novel not
about the legend treated by Goethe but depicting decadent German culture
between the two world wars.

The Holy Sinner (1951) is a fanciful account of the life of
Pope Gregory, in a style that later, as practised by Latin American
writers, might be called magic realism.

The unfinished parody The Confessions of Felix Krull was published
in 1954. It was filmed as a mini-series for German television in 1982.

Taken together, Mann's works are diverse in style and ideas, although
the conflict between personal freedom and social obligation is ever-present.
What changes over the years is the answer he gives to resolve the conflict,
sometimes opting for the primacy of the individual search for truth,
other times stressing sublimation of the individual ego, and still other
times expressing despair that there may not a resolution.

Which in some senses makes Thomas Mann a representative author of
the twentieth century, but also a frustrating read at times.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, principally
for Buddenbrooks.